Adding and aligning arabic dots and mark anchors is a very boring and time consuming process, and i am not OK with it anymore… so here is a suggestion for a better much faster way, probably the same way you already deal with latin marks:
1- On all Dotless glyphs i’ll add top and bottom anchors.
2- On all Dot glyphs (like threedotsupabove-ar) i’ll add top and bottom anchors.
3- On Mark glyphs i’ll add the usual double anchors.
That’s it!
So what will happen is that non-dotless glyphs like Theh and Sheen and Beh will use the anchors of the Dotless Component inside it for top and bottom, and will automatically attach and preview the needed dots to these anchors, and because these dots also got top and bottom anchors, tashkeel (Marks) are also auto set and previewed above the top dots and below the bottom dots, isn’t this what anchors are for? This way removes the whole tiring process form my way forever!
Users can still override any component’s inner anchor (or mark’s inner anchors) by adding a real anchor with the same name.
To recap: I am suggesting that DotFull glyphs should auto-use the anchors of the Dotless component inside it, and should auto-use them to attach the needed Dots where they should be, and auto-use the Dots own anchors to position the other accent marks where needed… with the ability to override this at will by adding a real anchors with the same name.
Glyphs should manage the rest, and i as a user don’t care what the rest is anyway, i need to keep focusing on the creative part more than this technical and boring part
I made 8 fonts with Glyphs until now الحمد لله, and it is still more pain than pleasure, dots and marks are on the pain side…
Maybe it works for latin this way, but not for Arabic, i tried adding top and bottom anchors to Dots and it didn’t align them automatically on letters that use them… and it didn’t align accents automatically on the dots… I expected it to work but it did not.
Also why should i set for example a top anchor on Beh when i already did for BehDotless and it is a component inside Beh already… Glyphs that use components should inherit the component’s anchors unless i override by adding an anchor with the same name…
It already works the way you want. Perhaps you are not using the anchor name you should use, which is “_top” instead of “bottom” in mark glyphs. In base forms (i.e. letters like behDotless), you do place top and bottom.
All these should be taken care of by placing anchors automatically (command-U).
It does work this way as @mekkablue & @Tosche mentioned,
My tip to you is: Position generic anchors on Dottless Glyphs; then add customized positions for anchors that only require specific amendments with dots/marks in specific glyphs.
You do not need to. The anchors of the components shine through, as you request. You can add extra anchors and override the shine-through anchors, but if the shine-through anchors work for you, you do not need to add anchors.
If the anchors do not work, you might have disabled the alignment in Font Info > Other setting. And sometimes you need to activate it for each component.
And the cmd+U only works if you use the correct glyph names or have set up your own GlyphData correctly.
